There's quite a bit of confusion about the Product Owner role - and a lot of Product Owners spend most of their time on low-value, or even detrimental activity, thus having little or no time to succeed in their role.
Here are ten timekillers that a Product Owner shouldn't waste time on:
10 - Writing User Stories
Too many Product Owners are caught up in "writing user stories," at worst matching all kinds of templates, such as the Connextra "As a ... I want ... so that ..." and the Gherkin "Given ... When ... Then" templates. Unfortunately, the better the PO gets at doing this, the more understanding they amass in their own head before transferring information to the developers. At best, the developers are degraded to a "feature factory," and at worst, they no longer understand what or why because someone else did the thinking for them. A PO is a single point of failure and bottleneck in Scrum, hence they should try to offload as much of what could go wrong as possible.
9 - Defining Implementations
Especially Product Owners with technical aptitude quickly fall into the trap of spending a lot of time on explicitly defining the "How" of solution implementation. Not only do they thus assume a Scrum Developer role, but also they disempower and disenfranchise their team. In a great Scrum team, the Product Owner should be able to rely on their developers for implementation - the PO can reduce themselves to discovering the relevant problem statements.
8 - Writing Acceptance Criteria
Probably the biggest time sink for Product Owners is detailling out all Acceptance Criteria for all Backlog Items to be "ready" for the Sprint. Where Acceptance Criteria are needed, they should be defined collaboratively, using a Pull mechanism (i.e. developers formulating, and then verifying with the Product Owner).
7 - Ticket Details
Depending on which ticket system you're using, a lot of details are required to make a ticket "valid." That could include relations to other tickets, due dates, target versions - none of these are required for Product Ownership. They're part of the development process, and belong to the Developers. (Side note: Sometimes, Scrum Masters also do these things - they shouldn't have to do it, either.)
The items 10-7 are all indicators that the Product Owner is misunderstood as an Analyst role - which is a dangerous path to tread. By doing this, the PO risks losing sight of the Big Picture, leading the entire Scrum Team off the wrong tack, potentially to obsolescence.
6 - Obtaining precise Estimates
Estimation in and of itself is a huge topic, and some organizations are so obsessed with their precision of estimates that they completely forgot that there's no such thing as a "precise estimate." As I like to say, "If we knew, they weren't called Estimates, but Knows." - Estimates should take as close to no time at all, and if a Product Owner finds themselves spending significant amounts of time on getting better estimates, something is seriously out of tune. Try probabilistic forecasting.
5 - Planning for the team
Team Planning serves three purposes: Getting a better mutual understanding, increasing clarity, and obtaining commitment on the team's Sprint Goal. Many Product Owners who used to work in project management functions before fall into the trap of building plans for the team to execute. This defeats all purposes of the Sprint Planning Event. The Product Owner's plan is the Backlog, which, combined with whatever sizing information they have, becomes the Product Roadmap. Content-level planning is a Developer responsibility.
4 - Accepting User Stories
A key dysfunction in many teams is that the Product Owner "accepts" User Stories, and is the one person who will mark them as "Done." Worst case scenario, this happens during Sprint Review. Long story short: When the team says, it's "Done," it should be done - otherwise, you have trust issues to discuss. And you might have had the wrong conversation about benefit and content during Planning. Acceptance is something either part of the technical process, i.e. development, or something that relates to the user - that is, developers should negotiate with users. The Product Owner is not a User Proxy.
3 - Tracking Progress
Yet another "Project Manger gone Product Owner" Antipattern is tracking the team's progress. A core premise of Scrum is that developers commit to realistic goals that they want to achieve during a Sprint. The Product Owner should be able to rely that at any time, the most important items are being worked on, and the team is doing their best to deliver value as soon as possible. Anything else would be a trust issue that the Scrum Master should address. At a higher level, we have very detailed progress tracking in Sprint Reviews, where we see goal completion once per Sprint. If teams can reliably do that, this should suffice - otherwise, we have bad goals, and that is the thing the PO should fix.
2 - Generating Reports
Reporting is a traditional management exercise, but most reports are waste. There are three kind of key reports:
- In-Sprint Progress Reports, as mentioned above, they are pretty worthless in a good team
- Product Roadmap Reports - which should be a simple arrangement of known and completed mid-term goals, presented in the Sprint Review for discussion and adjustment.
- Product Value Reports - which can be created by telemetry and should be an (ideally automated) feature of the Product itself.
1 - Bridge Communication
The final, biggest and yet most common antipattern, of the Product Owner is what I call "Bridge Communication" - taking information from A and bringing it to B. Product Owners should build decentralized networks, connecting developers and stakeholders, avoiding "Telephone Games" that come with information loss and delay.
When the Product Owner has their benefit hypothesis straight, developers can take care of the rest. Developers can talk with stakeholders and obtain user information by themselves. A Product Owner shouldn't even be involved into all the details, because if they wanted to, they'll constantly find their calendar crammed, and they become a blocker to the team's flow of value - the opposite of what they should be doing!
The Alternative
(About half of the points in this article describe the SAFe definition of a PO, but that's an entirely different topic in and of itself)
After having clarified what a PO should not do, let's talk really brief about what is a better investment of time:
A Product Owner's key responsibility is to maximize the value of the product at any given point in time. That is, at any time, the Product should have the best Return on Invest - for the amount of work done so far, the Product should be as valuable as possible. That requires the Product Owner to have a keen understanding on what and where the value is. For this, the PO must spend ample time on market research, stakeholder communication and expectation management.
From this, they obtain user stories - which are indeed just stories told by users about problems they'd like to have addressed by the Product. The Product Owner turns stories into benefit hypotheses - that is, the benefit they'd like to obtain, either for the company or the userbase. They then cluster benefit hypotheses into coherent themes: Sprint and Product Goals. These goals then need to be communicated, aligned and verified with stakeholders. By doing this Product Owner successfully, they'll maximize the chances that their Product succeeds - and the impact of their work.
The Product Owner can free time by minimize the time spent on implementation. Successful Product Owners let their development team take care of all development-related work (including Analysis, Design and Testing) and trust the team's Definition of Done. That is, their only contact with Work in Process needs to be renegotiating priorities when something goes out of whack, a value hypothesis is falsified or new information invalidated the team's plan.
